About KDE eV, its Board of Directors and the Treasurer position

In order to get to the point where we are right now in KDE, coding is obviously not enough. To be able to ship KDE Platform, Workspaces and Applications, there are non-technicals activities that must be done in different areas. Some of those can be better accomplished creating a legal entity.

To support KDE in some of those tasks, we created some time ago KDE eV, a legal organization based in Germany. It is formed by some KDE members that want to put some time and effort in helping developers to concentrate in what they like the most…. coding, bug fixing, translating, designing, etc.. KDE eV support the community in four major areas:

Legal

Administrative

Economic

Institutional

It is important to focus on the verb support, which have little to do with drive or decide. This concept is not easy to understand and, in practice, it brings some challenges. But that idea is part or our identity and differentiate us from many Free Software projects. Like any other legal entity, KDE eV has some duties that we cannot avoid, obviously, but we work everyday to make that compatible with what our community want and demand.

To achieve this goal, we need to be constantly open to what the community is demanding and the best way to do this is involving in KDE e.V. those people who significantly contribute to our project.

A German eV is different in some aspects from a Foundation (in US for example) or an Association (in Spain for instance). These differences explain some of the limitations and improvements we can achieve. Legal entities are just instruments and there is no single universal tool that works for everything everywhere, right?

KDE Board of Directors

Like every legal entity, somebody must be responsible for actions and decisions taken, leading and representing the group. KDE eV Assembly elects a five Board members (individually) for a three year period. Different countries also have different ideas of Board rights and duties.

KDE eV elects a Chairman (we call it President) and two proxies. One of them must be the Treasurer. As you probably know, Cornelius Schumacher is our President. Sebastian Kügler Vicepresident, Celeste Lyn Paul and Lydia Pintscher are also Board members.

Treasurer

A few weeks ago, Frank Karlitschek, resigned as Treasurer to focus on OwnCloud Inc., his successful new project, so a we had a vacancy.

The plan is to open an election during KDE eV Assembly, that will take place during Akademy, to elect a long term Treasurer. Until then, I’ve been elected as new Board member and Treasurer.

One of the things I would like to do during this period is to write about the economic aspects of KDE. Some of the information I will manage is confidential, but there is room for explaining a lot about how a community driven Libre Software project, like KDE, work. We usually do not have time for things like this but I hope I can, at least, write two or three posts about this topic before Akademy.

I don’t want to finish without thanking KDE eV members for supporting me. I’ll work hard to live up to the circumstances.

Not only coding: also documenting, sketching icons, translating, bug/issue handling, designing UX, doing admin of the infrastructure, promoting…Most surely just code, but never forget also the other people contrubuting!